Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford

With Bliss, Remembered, the celebrated Frank Deford has produced a work of literature which ranks with the best of his many novels, including Everybody’s All American which Sports Illustrated ranked as one of the twenty-five best sports books of all time.

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics Sydney begins an intense love affair with a German, but the affair abruptly ends when political forces tear them apart. Back in the US, Sydney is left healing her broken heart when a striking American begins to pursue her.

 

Sydney is daring, vulnerable, and memorable. With her the reader longs for an earlier time with its greater simplicity and honesty, when promises seemed to be forever but choices so dire in the enveloping shadows of a changing world

This book sounds so simple: Sydney Stringfellow, nearing death, sits her son down and tells him about a special, long-ago time of her life. But Deford’s beautifully written novel is a bit more complex than that. It introduces us to two Sydneys, the elderly-but-sprightly woman dying of cancer and the teenage girl, graceful and naive, who decided, against pretty tall odds, that she would swim for her country in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This is one of those novels that defies categorization. There’s romance in it, but it’s not a love story. It’s set, partly, against the backdrop of a world war, but it’s not a war story. There is heartrending tragedy, but it’s not a tragedy. The story doesn’t fully reveal itself until the end, when Deford ties all the threads together, showing us finally what he’s been building before our eyes. This multilayered, finely crafted, and elegantly constructed novel will appeal both to readers of historical fiction and to those who crave any kind of writing that is genuinely inspiring.

 

351 pages (June 2010)

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Book Page at BookBrowse.

Reading Guide from BookMovement.

 

13 Book Club Questions to Energize Any Meetup from Bustle

50 Great Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Book Riot

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

Bliss, Remembered at goodreads

 

Review at historical novel society

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from Publishers Weekly

 

Author Interview on NPR's Weekend Edition

Frank Deford at Tucson Festival of Books:

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Title Read-alikes: Love and Ruin by Paula McLain; City of Women by David Gillham; The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; The Good German by Joseph Kanon; The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy; Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali; The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig; The Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim; The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab; Somerset by Leila Meacham; Butcher's Crossing by John Williams; and The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall.